“When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.”

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

In order to get as much fame as one’s father one has to much more able than he.

Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ This stranger is a theologian.

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

There is only one virtue, justice; only one duty, to be happy; only one corollary, not to overvalue life and not to fear death.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.

There are cats and cats.

It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.

The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.

For me, my thoughts are my prostitutes.

If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders.

The Muslim world, with its history and cultures, and indeed its different interpretations of Islam, is still little known in the West.

For GOD is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything.

Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein IS the monster.

Crime is increasing, trigger happy policing. Panic is spreading, God knows where we’re heading.

So I started out for God knows where. I guess I’ll know when I get there.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

There are only four people who knew what the Beatles were about anyway.